Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny. David Crane

Marco Bozzaris, at Missolonghi … He [Byron] has written nothing more, but will I doubt not. Our intimacy has never been ruffled, but smoother than ever, and I am most anxious in upholding his great name to the world.¹³

      That last sentence is revealing. Whatever the private grievances that might emerge in his letters, Trelawny knew where his public credit lay. His plans, so extravagant in their telling here, were more circumscribed, more dependent on Byron than he would ever have confessed to the Pisan women. On 2 September, he was loading his belongings onto a small vessel, waiting for an opportunity to run the Turkish blockade under the cover of dark, and land on the western coast of the Peloponnese. His instructions were to go with Hamilton Browne to the Greek leaders, and acting as Byron’s secretaries, deliver letters and report back on the political situation.

      On the night of the 6th, they were at last ready to leave. Their farewell was warm. ‘As I took leave of him,’ Trelawny recalled in his Records, ‘his last words were, “Let me hear from you often, – come back soon. If things are farcical, they will do for ‘Don Juan’; if heroical, you have another canto of ‘Childe Harold’.”’¹⁴

      It was the last time Trelawny saw Byron. Farewells over, he and Hamilton Browne embarked on a caique for the short journey across to the Peloponnese, beaching the next morning without incident on the scruffy coastline beneath the half-ruined tower of the Pirgos customs house.

      In classical times, this north-west corner of the Peloponnese had been celebrated for its prosperity, but the long depredations of Turkish rule had begun a task that two years of war had now completed. There was only a solitary guard on the customs post to mark their arrival, a ‘creature’ of Colocotrones living under semi-siege in a sort of hen coop at the top of the tower, reachable only by a ladder which he pulled up at night. It was a necessary precaution. The sole authority he recognized, he told Trelawny, was Colocotrones’s, but even his writ had a limited jurisdiction. A few days earlier a party of Turks from Patras had raided the village of Gastoumi a few miles to the north, killing a number of inhabitants and carrying off women and other booty.

      Byron’s name, however, seemed enough to secure the guard’s co-operation and their bags went unsearched. They were treated to a breakfast of fowl and eggs, an execrable sweet wine and raki and then escorted on foot through a landscape of dunes and prickly thorn into Pirgos. That night they spent in the town. Twenty Spanish dollars secured them mules and a guide for the journey on to Tripolis and early the next morning they were ready to start.

      In later years when Trelawny looked back to these first hours on Greek soil, reality was adjusted to fall more in line with expectations, and that single guard cowering in his hencoop was replaced by a squad of Moorish mercenaries. If Greece, however, fell short of what was required, Trelawny did not. His whole life had been an imaginative preparation for this, and he was ready. Like some initiate, he had held himself aloof from their hosts, from the sordid reality embodied in the poverty and pinched, emaciated faces of Pirgos. His old clothes were gone too, and he was dressed now in Suliote costume, ‘which wonderfully became him’, Hamilton Browne admiringly recorded, ‘being tall in stature and of a dark complexion, with a fine, commanding physiognomy’.¹⁵ Less than a day’s ride ahead of them lay the gentle, wooded hills among which the ancient shrine of Olympia nestled. Beyond those, clearly visible in the distance, and filled for every Philhellene with all the violent glamour of its classical past rose the massive and spectacular heartland of the central Peloponnese.

      It was a hard, four-day journey to Tripolis and it was the afternoon of the first day before the two men emerged from a defile onto a long, narrow plain covering the remains of Olympia. Along its southern edge the River Alpheius marked their course, shallow and clear in the late summer, its gravelly bed broken up by little islets as it flowed westwards to its mythical union beneath the waters of the Mediterranean with the nymph Arethusa.

      For many volunteers following this same route, the first sight of the river, with all its classical associations, came almost as a guarantee that their crusade had at last begun. To the Moreot peasants who lived on its ravaged banks it was nothing more romantic than the ‘Rufea’, but to every Philhellene who passed this way it was still stubbornly the ‘Alpheius’ – the river of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Pausanias’s travels, the path not just into the central highlands where it has its source but into a Greece that was more real to them than the land they had come to save.

      It is one of the paradoxes of ‘Philhellenism’ that while the word means the love of Modern Greece, as opposed to ‘Hellenism’ which is concerned with its past, it was precisely that past which had brought most volunteers to the war. It can seem at times, in fact, as if the Greece through which the volunteer travelled was two separate countries, occupying the same physical space and clothed in the same landscape, but as distinct in his mind as the Holy Land and modern Israel to the devout pilgrim, the present only sanctified by its association with a history which was at once inspiration and balm, moral justification and emotional crutch among the horrors of Balkan warfare. ‘The dress, the manners, the very ignorance of the people has something in it wild and original,’ Lytton Bulwer rhapsodized in a letter home that captures the mental confusions and immaturity of so many Philhellenes at this time.

      We are brought back to our boyhood by the very name of Greece; and every spot in this land reminds us of the days devoted to its classic fables, and the scenes where we were taught them. Methinks I see old Harrow Churchyard, and its venerable yews, under whose shadow I have Iain many a summer evening.¹⁶

      And now, as the two men skirted the plain of Olympia, it was this other and older Greece, invisible but potent, that lay quite literally buried around them beneath the silt left by centuries of inundation. Across the river a few piles of ruined brickwork and the odd massive fragment of marble from the temple of Zeus were visible, but six years before the first systematic excavations that was almost all of the ancient site that could be seen.

      It is a futile but irresistible exercise to try to balance the profit and loss that stand between contemporary experience and the Greece the Philhellenes knew. There is such a deceptive feeling of immutability about even its ruins that it is easy to forget how different their Greece was, but it is worth remembering that for all the remote beauty of early nineteenth-century Olympia everything that now conjures up its classical past for us, the stadium, the treasuries, the Philippeion, the drinking cup of Pheidias, the inscribed helmet of Miltiades, the victor of Marathon – that supreme symbol of the Greece Philhellenism invoked with such totemic force – still belonged to the future.

      There is a genuine poignancy in the image of a great classicist like Colonel Leake standing alone in the middle of what he called ‘a beautiful desert’,¹⁷ cut off by the mud as much from this future as Olympia’s history. With a man of his seriousness it is tempting to feel that he was born a century too soon, and yet for most Philhellenes the name itself was enough, the past all the richer for existing nowhere outside their imaginations, entwined with school-day memories and unfettered by an historical knowledge which Byron only half-jokingly denounced as the enemy of romance. Gladiators could fight here in the fancy where they had never trod in history, crowds bay for blood. ‘How striking the contrast between the silence of these fields,’ one Philhellene wrote of Olympia,

      now melancholy and deserted, and their jubilee in the old times of Greece! One marvelled in re-peopling the spot, all lonely but for a few travellers on their sorry mules, with the glad assemblage of aspiring thousands; – in listening for the spirit of eloquence in that solitude, and looking on a desolate waste as the glittering arena of pride, valour, and wisdom.¹⁸

      Here was a vision of Greece which in its dangerous sentimentality was fraught with certain disillusion, but for the moment it found an echo in a landscape as seductive as itself. Ahead of Trelawny and Browne waited the barren uplands and wild gorges of the central Morea, yet as they began their ascent out of the plain of Pisa, crossing and recrossing